As I said previously, manufacturability of in-display fingerprint sensors has been an industry issue. This is why you have not seen them in stores in the past. Some sensor types have had an issue in bonding the sensor to the display without affecting the sensor performance. Some implementations may require a special display design. Clear ID uses standard optical bonding processes. Synaptics says it is expecting the total 2018 market for in-display sensors to be 70M units That shows the huge potential for this technology right out of the blocks.

New OLED display driver chip

Synaptics also announced Tuesday two new additions to its OLED display driver IC (DDIC) portfolio—the ClearView R66455 and R66451. The two new offerings offer a variety of new features, such as processing for rounded corners and notch cut-outs, smooth dimming technology, and support for extra-long displays. From a performance standpoint, Synaptics’ OLED capabilities are being enhanced with flexible gamma control, HDR support, and the company’s patented sub-pixel rendering technology. While these announcements take the backseat, in my mind, to the new Clear ID fingerprint sensors, they look to be strong additions to Synaptics’ DDIC portfolio.

Wrapping up

After using Clear ID on the pre-production Vivo smartphone and learning more about the technology, I am very excited for the arrival of Clear ID on even more smartphones around the globe. I'm also interested in seeing given Clear ID, how the industry balances standard fingerprint sensor versus in-display versus 3D face sensing. Synaptics has removed major design and implementation barriers, and it would be great to see this on the next premium Samsung, Apple, Motorola and LG smartphones. The Vivo announcement gave credibility to the announcement, and Synaptics’ 70M unit market projection shows the potential.

If you are like me and asking, “how did Synaptics do what the largest technology companies were not able to do,” I have thoughtfully considered this. Synaptics does one single thing as a company, and that is human interface products and technologies, and Clear ID is arguably its fifth generation of fingerprint readers. Human interface experiences are what the company specializes in, and it does this extremely well.